Google: We can't get our free email service to work, but screw that, let's blame all those solar non-innovators and do...

Gmail goes down. Blogger goes down. And Nero Sergei plays the harp, while Rome is burning (metaphorically of course, with their pedophile Catholic Priests of which you can read here).

And you thought discombobulation was just for politicians.

Google is now where Microsoft was roughly between 1995 - 1998. Serendipitious with one product, they think they own the world, know better than everyone else (so does Yours Truly).

And, I am just letting this blog be here, so that I can come back here and sing "I told you so...". I sing with a great voice. I am telling you so.

Google - stay the course. On one day, Gmail failed, and you got enough of a bad rap. Yes, it may not look like it now, but just wait till it fails the next time.

Also, the whole blogger story I mentioned in the last post: If you go to the Google Help url there, you will see that many users are still facing issues. Yes, it has not gained a lot of the "fluffy" Silicon Valley press attention, but, it is a good sign that Google has failed to integrate the various companies it has been buying. Throw Solar into this mix and you know where it is going...

If Google really chooses to innovate, why won't it simply do that, and spin those ventures separately?

Me-thinks it is all a Washington attention-grabber

Blogger craps out, bloggers panic and Google's community leans in to help

A very good friend of mine likes to read my blogs on Medical Devices, Biotechnology and Bioengineering as I flamboyantly call it at http://chaaraka.blogspot.com .

She emailed me today asking "Did you take your blog down or is the FDA finally on to you?"

In case you never read my blogs before, they tend to be not so kind of our Government and the way it handles medical devices, Indians at airports and allows Republicans to exercise first amendment rights (okay, I didn't blog about that last bit, but who here disagrees?).

As a result, when I could not locate my blog and was informed tacitly by Google that visiting a blog that had been composed by a near-permanently financially insolvent Stanford alumnus who doesn't drink, smoke, use Adnonsense, or charge for consulting, resume reviews and whatever else...could potentially be harmful(!) I panicked... with a capital P.

After frantically emailing a whole bunch of folks begging for any help in restoring or just accessing my archives so that I can take my blogs elsewhere, I found out that a lot of people are very, very helpful - as many did forward my requests around. I am thankful to them first of all.

Then, I also found out why we all love and rely on Google so much. Through one of the community members (Thanks Again!) on the "Blogger Help Forum" I found out that this happened to a lot of bloggers around, and Google is making an effort to resolve the situation.

At this point all users need to do is to submit their affected blog address to a Google spreadsheet and Google/Blogger will take care of it at their end. Very nice!

All is well that may end well sooner than later. Here is the link to the forum if you wish to know more:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=7ad1d2f6e077ca6d&hl=en

Aside from being grateful to the community member and Google employees as well, I am both very pleasantly surprised at how much trust I have unconsciously put into the GOOGLE brand and also wary of it.

A great lesson learnt - no one is above risk! Nothing is above being backed up!!!

Good stuff from gmail

Now that Gmail is out of beta!, things seem to be chugging along nicely.

The biggest frustration for me used to be that I would accidentally click on "Report Spam" and have to painfully undo it (although, undo itself was cool!).

Look what I found today morning when I accidentally clicked on "Report Spam" again:



Awesome, n'est pas?

What inspires a blog to be revived? Elephants of course!!!

[Click on title for link to external article referenced in this blog]

Years and years ago (yes, 2 years is now considered once upon a time..) I used to publish about my views on telecommunications, the interwebs (Thanks Colbertt!) and what not...

However, it all sullied after I had to leave the US on travel and by the time I came back, life had taken some obviously downward turns (just when I thought it couldn't happen...)

In any case, I wanted to blog on this "renames" blog (I didn't know what the hell would be a good name, and if people were really particular they could blow their heads off trying to acronymize the fake abberivation "renames" you know).

Well, what did inspire me?

Telecommunications has becoming boring in the last two years.

WHAT DID I JUST SAY?

Look at it this way - it has mostly been about teens txtin' each o'ter or however the heck it is that they talk to each other. You could watch video (read po..) on mobile phones, videocon' with your mum and yada yada yada.

For someone who is not a teen (by that I remind you I am still about 9 years old on the human maturity scale) this was all pretty dumb.

And, let me admit this. I have owned a phone since September 2001. So that's what 7 full years now? I still don't have a great use (I have good uses, bearly tolerable uses and my creditors have awesome annoying uses) for one.

Its irritating to have to pay scat loads of money for a thingamajig that might be causing brain cancer, may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause reproductive birth defects (and so the unborn demons weep!) and so on and so forth.

However, all that is in the past now.

I have newfound respect for SMS and mobile phones.

Really?

Yes! Its like the time you find out that you may have "good" bacteria in your stomach!

I love the article - click on the title to read it!

----
All jokes aside, its time that mobile phones got past photographs of cops tazering students and people changing clothes or sms messages announcing Vice Presidential candidates (for God knows what fracking reason, we will never know - it's only time till frack becomes unmentionable too!)

The elephants need saving, just as much as the crops need protection and vice versa. The biggest problem in Africa is that we still have something left to save, and of course extreme penury can cause some sticky situations with the "saving" business.

So unlike the idiotic animal "lovers" of the west who decide to assassinate Professors, a lot of real brilliance (not the fluff white brick "Apple" type innovations) is being exercised in Kenya!

An sms message from the elephant alerts the rangers of its approach to the village, which they can then use to strike fear into him and chase him away!

We won't know if it will work, but it is one of those "low tech" "high worth" solutions out there!

Of course, don't try this in the US - T-Mobile, AT&T and Spring are likely to push prices up and then Congress will have a "talk" with them (not over the phone please, otherwise we tax payers have to pay for that too!).

What next?

Congress will "ground" the erring over-chargers?

Till next time!

Okay, sender authentication is here...so what?

The amount of spam continues to grow. The amount of spam, assumed to be good email is growing. The amount of good email, trashed and stashed away as possible spam is also growing.

There is really no use to huddling together in five star hotels (other than for the hospitality industry's sake), instead of worrying about real solutions to real problems.

While industries, and standards groups keep talking of the next big thing, it is presumed that soon, if not already, 80% of all email will be junk....

Where there is goodwill...

.. there is Microsoft trying to steal it..

Why would you want to use "free" code to a(n) EULA that you later use to go after people that won't pay for your software...hmm, the big blue (their blue screen is bigger, and appears more often than IBM's ;) ) slipped on this one...just like it has, on pretty much everything!

The DVD Wars begin, I am bored...

Long long ago

In a galaxy far, far away

There were two stupid Japanese companies

That were trying to make everyone buy their expensive crap

and so goes the story. What I now really wish, is that people would ditch both formats, and buy another one. This is going to become a debacle like the Laser Discs, or the much cliched Betamax.

I would like to start a company to build DVD players. In Star Wars, they talked about the "Empire" and the "Resistance". Not about people who laughed at both sides and made some cheap cash....

If you build products, people will write bad articles about you..

Something, of course, Microsoft doesn't care about. I was quite interested to read that the MS Mobile OS was not "working properly". This is quite fresh, new and disturbing to the IT and phone-user world I guess. When has MS ever built bad products...

Jokes aside, the sad point in the article is how the author writes very briefly, doesn't actually get technical at all, and then goes on to peg the whole point about the security patches on the desktop operation. Whatever happened to studying journalism before getting into it?

Now can we complain...? This person is writing about MS, from, in all probability, a Windows computer, or one that runs it, even as a dual or triple boot...these gaffes are understand-able!!!

iTunes is not the end and beginning of digital music

There is more..and this is the point we want to stress!!!! Is someone listening out there, for crying out loud..or singing out loud!!!!

Oracle - still embracing the old style business model...let's make a little of everything

And they are worried about patents, and intellectual property of Linux. Here is a scary scenario. One of these days, Microsoft will buy a Linux distribution. Then all the big ones would have been bought out, hashed out as proprietary, and then they will go after the guys still using Linux in the Open Source format. This cannot be good news for the Linux world.

I always thought it was bad business to build something for free. I have forced to change my opinion over the years. Now, I think it is bad business to build anything without protecting intellectual property -- you never know whose hands what you create and set free might land on.

Something has to be done, and quick. Otherwise, the work of so many engineers will simply be stolen by the likes of Ellison, and that, is for people to worry if it is good or bad...

How to bring crap onto yourself..Apple style

It gives me great pleasure to open my mailbox and find that Apple is being sued. It actually doesn't!

The problem with Apple, something I have been screaming for years, is that they are the best at "stealing" innovation, and then crying sour apples (or grapes, whatever) when others steal similar technology. Starting from the GUI to the iPod, none of their products are really their own.

Nothing wrong in "borrowing", "adapting", or as the latest cliche goes, "synergizing" others' ideas, but wait a second, you also want to sue them? This one might go into the next edition of "The hundred stupidest business blunders ever". Maybe, I will write that book...and hope its not a blunder too.

Oh well, now to grab that much needed coffee...